Currently, interior walls of isolated places such as warehouses, cold storage rooms, stores, laboratory, hospital, clinic and surgery rooms, places for food production, etc., which require temperature conditioning, and at the same time, require sterilization conditions, present cleaning inconvenience, lack of hygiene, impermeability problems, and difficulties with closures.
On the one hand, there are different types of panels available in the market for forming isolated places that can be temperature conditioned. On the other hand, those places which require sterile conditions are only formed by interior walls of existing buildings. At present, there are no panels which can satisfy the cleaning, hygienic and impermeability requirements for such thermally protected and sterilized places.
According to general rules applied to sterilized places, interior walls must be cleaned easily, and walls of critical areas must be perfectly smooth, washable and capable of being sterilized. Therefore, they must be free of projections and discontinuities. Also, edging joints existing between walls, between walls and ceiling, and between walls and floor, should be eliminated. Closings must be watertight and should be built with isolating glass panes. It is desirable to keep sterilized areas perfectly hermetic and to avoid recesses and projections.
Traditional heat-insulating panels are formed by rectangular bodies consisting of two exterior sheets generally made of steel--although this material often causes oxidation problems due to damages and strikes--and by a nucleus filled with insulating material, such as expanded polystyrene, rigid polyurethane, etc. The exterior surfaces often have ribs, box pleatings, fluted cracks, etc., which are caused by some structural strength requirements, producing hygienic problems and making cleaning activities difficult because of the presence of areas that allow both dust deposits and other kinds of volatile substance accumulation. Also, panels offer an assembly solution, which does not allow completely hermetic joints between panels. However, the main difficulty with these elements is a hygienic problem, because they allow for bacteria and microorganism accumulation, they cause filtration problems, in addition to the non-solution of the edge joining problems.
Interior walls of sterilized areas require the use of expensive coatings, wall interventions and other extra installations to guarantee the best impermeability against polluting agents, the avoidance of thermal oscillations, the highest natural light conditions and the correct attraction of solar energy. Nevertheless, it can happen that the type of covering used sometimes is not the most desirable, for example, the typical use of glazed tile, which, from a hygienic point of view, offers certain deficiencies because of the presence of microbiologic implantations and difficulty in cleaning joints existing between glazed tiles.